Iraqi Oil Ministry Bans Kurdish Language In Documents

The Iraqi Oil Ministry has banned the use of Kurdish words in official documents, threatening Kurdish employees with lawsuits if they violate the ban, Kurdish media report, citing a document issued earlier this week by a senior Oil Ministry Official.

“There are Kurdish terms used in most of the documents the NGC submits which is against the motion issued in 1968 to maintain the safety of the Arabic language,” Hamdan Uwaij Rashid, General Inspector at the Oil Ministry said in the statement, which was addressed to the North Gas Company.

Apparently, the document is a follow-up on another one, issued by the Iraqi Secretariat of the Council of Ministers, which was circulated to all Iraqi institutions in August 2017. Interestingly enough, this was before the historic Kurdistan independence referendum that heated up relations between Erbil and Baghdad and eventually led to Iraqi forces retaking control of the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding fields from the Kurdish Peshmerga.

The Kurdistan Regional Government estimates local crude oil reserves at some 45 billion barrels—this puts Kurdistan ahead of Nigeria in terms of reserves and what’s more, this oil is cheap to pump. According to figures for 2016, Kurdistan pumped about half a million barrels daily, which was expected to rise to above 600,000 in 2017. Most of this is exported to Turkey, but since the Iraqi government took over the Kirkuk fields, some 300,000 bpd in production has been shut in.

Earlier this week, Kurdish officials said Iraq cannot export the Kirkuk oil to Turkey without first inking a deal with the KRG, following reports that Iraq’s Haideer al-Abadi and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan had struck an agreement for the resumption of Kirkuk oil exports to Turkey. The message from Erbil suggests relations between the central government and the Kurdistan authorities have yet to settle.

Leave a comment

That email address is already in the database. Please login to your account to post your comment, or enter a different email address to continue with your comment & account creation.

Captcha

Comment

Please understand that, by submitting this form, you will be creating a free OilPrice.com account, and therefore agree to abide by our Terms of Use. Your details will be stored in our database and shared with our third party mailing list provider. You will be sent an email containing a link that will ask you to generate a new password - please follow the link to complete your OilPrice account activation.

We will save the information entered above in our website. Your comment will then await moderation from one of our team. If approved, your data will then be publically viewable on this article. Please confirm you understand and are happy with this and our privacy policy by ticking this box. You can withdraw your consent, or ask us to give you a copy of the information we have stored, at any time by contacting us.